by Sue Gee
Bello:
hidden talent rediscovered
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Contents
Sue Gee
Dedication
London
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Brussels
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Berlin
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Prague
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Sue Gee
Letters From Prague
Sue Gee
Sue Gee is an acclaimed and established novelist. Reading in Bed (2007) was a Daily Mail Book Club selection; The Mysteries of Glass (2005) was long listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction. She ran the MBA Creative Writing Programme at Middlesex University from 2000–2008 and currently teaches at the Faber Academy. Sue Gee has also published many short stories, some of which have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and her most recent publication is a collection of stories, Last Fling (Salt 2011). She lives in London and Herefordshire.
Dedication
To Jamie
And to the memory of my brave and lovely mother
London
The scale of world events
Chapter One
On a wet night in April, 1969, Harriet Pickering sat in the striped armchair by her bedroom window, reading a letter from Prague. The envelope was of thin, poor-quality paper, and bruised with postmarks: others had opened the envelope before her, and resealed it with a line of cheap glue. Harriet, who had been waiting for this letter since last autumn, coming home day after day from school to deepening disappointment, felt a shiver of distaste.
She pictured a poky room in a border station, a single light bulb, a desk piled high; she pictured a small fat man with drink on his breath, reaching for his paper knife, slitting and slitting, as if he were gutting dead fish, exposing brave words – I am well, and hope you are also – and scoring through braver – You will understand that things are rather difficult now – with thick black pen. Snowflakes fell through the darkness on to the railway track; a train drew into the station; a boy came into the poky room with a sack and snow on his shoulders.
The small fat censor shovelled the heaps and heaps of envelopes filled with absence and deprivation – we all miss you, and hope to see you again one day – into the sack and pulled open the drawer of his desk. He unscrewed the bottle inside it. The boy flung the sack to the back of a carriage; the train was shunted into a siding, and sat there for weeks.
Was this what had happened to Harriet’s letter? She looked again at the front of the envelope, with her name and address in hesitant Biroed capitals: Miss Harriet Pickering, 143, Thackeray Gardens, Kensington, London W8, Anglická. She looked again at the letter, where he had written his own address: ulice Klimentská 6, Byt 8, Žižkov, Praha.
Apartment 8. Stone stairs inside a rambling tenement. An echoing stairwell, a roomy old apartment divided and subdivided, a wood-burning stove and a dark wall hung with tapestries. Or perhaps that was all wrong. Perhaps he lived in a concrete block on the outskirts of the city, with unmade roads around it and a broken lift within. There was a tiny kitchen where condensation streamed down ill-fitting windows; a strip of bedroom where he slept and studied, and wrote to her.
He had written! How could she have doubted him?
Kochana Harriet, Vesele vanoce …
Harriet got up from the striped armchair and went to her bureau. A poster was pinned to the wall above it; the bureau was open and strewn with essays; there were textbooks on top of it, pages marked with strips of paper; more textbooks lay on the floor – Milton and Molière and A.J.P. Taylor, A-level English and French and History, none of which seemed at this moment to matter much. She took from one of the pigeonholes the small blue phrase book and dictionary Karel had bought for her last August, from W.H. Smith in Regent Street, near the vegetarian restaurant where they were both working.
‘Now,’ he said, as they came out on to the crowded pavement, ‘we talk more easier.’
‘Easily,’ said Harriet, slipping the phrase book out of its paper bag. ‘Thank you.’
It was five o’clock, and they were both going in for the evening shift, he in the kitchen, washing up, and she behind the counter, serving parsnip soup. Normally given to polite impatience with arrogance or dithering in the queue, Harriet found herself these days smiling radiantly at elderly ladies peering at chick peas, charming those who changed their minds about stuffed mushrooms. She smiled at the ticket collector at Oxford Circus on her way in, and at the one at High Street Kensington on her way back; she smiled, these days, at everyone. Now she smiled at Karel, and looked up ‘lovely’and ‘day’, bumping into a tourist with a backpack.
They made to cross and she stepped out too early, the number 12 bus roaring past her, lifting her summer skirt. He took her arm.
‘You are crazy, stay by my side.’
They walked hand in hand through the narrow streets leading behind Liberty’s to the restaurant. Earlier, they had met and had lunch in the basement bedsit Karel had rented in a house just off the Earls Court Road. The house was given over entirely to bedsits. Enormous Australians thundered down the stairs, collected mail from plywood boxes fastened to the wall and shouted to each other as they banged the front door shut. Beneath, looking out on to dustbins and railings. Karel’s room had cracks in the ceiling and a carpet pockmarked with cigarette burns from a previous tenant, a small desperate Irishman who had left without paying the rent. The room also had a Baby Belling on a shelf, a scratched table with two folding chairs, a cheap chest of drawers and a gas fire. Pushed up against the wall between door and window was a narrow bed, covered in greying candlewick. Harriet, on her third visit, had replaced this with Indian cotton, and put roses in a coffee jar on the table.
‘Is better,’ said Karel, who had cleaned the windows and was stuffing the candlewick bedspread into the chest of drawers. He turned to look. ‘Thank you.’
‘My pleasure,’ said Harriet. ‘Where’s the Hoover?’
There was no Hoover, but a squeaking Ewbank in a cupboard in the hall with one or two mournful-looking dusters and a floormop. Harriet ran the Ewbank over the cigarette burns and picked up a certain amount of fluff.
‘I try before,’ said Karel, making tea in glasses. ‘Is very old, that thing.’ He dropped slices of lemon into the glasses and set them on the table by the roses.
‘Poor old thing,’ said Harriet, and put the sweeper back in the cupboard. When she returned to the room she saw that Karel had opened the window: now the glass was clean the dustbins beyond didn’t seem to matter quite so much. Footsteps went past; morning sun, heralding another baking day, made its way down the basement steps and shone on to the roses. They sat at the table, drinking their lemon tea.
‘In Czechoslovakia,’ said Karel, lighting a Marlboro cigarette, ‘there is no Hoover. Everything is old brush and –’ he flicked out the match and made a gesture. ‘What you call this?’
‘Dustpan?’ said Harriet, looking at Karel’s long, beautifully made fingers, and the fortunate cigarette, resting between his lips.
‘Dustpin,’ said Karel, inhaling deeply. ‘My grandmother is sweeping carpet with dustpin since I am a little boy.’
Harriet thought of Karel as a little boy and felt her heart turn over.
‘In this country,’ he continued, having been here some five or six weeks, ‘everyone is materialism.’
‘Materialistic. Not everyone.’
‘In my country we are fighting for the essentials. For liberty to meet and make discussions, to move without the police spies, to –’ he made another gesture.
‘To write?’
‘To write, yes, but also –’ He picked up his A-Z and gave out multiple copies in rapid motion.
‘To publish,’ said Harriet, illuminated.
‘To publish, yes.’ He drew again on the cigarette.
‘But things are easier now?’ she asked, with vague memories of intermittent news items earlier in the year, of nice Mr Dubcek and his unassuming manner, his modest smile. A few months ago, Czechoslovakia had been just another country. A few months ago she had never even met Karel.
Never even met him!
‘They are easier,’ he was saying. ‘But how long? We are exciting and also fearful.’
Harriet finished her tea. ‘I must go, soon. I’m on at one today.’
Morning sun fell past the jar of roses and on to the Indian cotton bedspread, dusty pink and blue.
Karel stubbed out the Marlboro cigarette. ‘Now you work, I study. This evening I wash up all alone.’
Harriet thought of the crowded kitchens, the heavy wooden chopping boards and clouds of steam, the people coming and going as Karel stood in his jeans and white T-shirt before the enormous sink. People came and went with trays, but he thought of himself as alone, just because she wasn’t there.
‘We must rearrange our shifts,’ she said.
‘Must what?’ He looked at her, laughing.
‘We must have the same shift,’ she said slowly and clearly. ‘Sorry. Anyway, I’ll see you on Friday.’ She got to her feet. Friday. Two and a half days!
Footsteps pounded down the stairs above them, someone bellowed, ‘Okay, that’s cool,’ and the front door slammed. A little puff of plaster dust fell on to the bed from one of the cracks in the ceiling. Harriet brushed it off on her way to the door.
‘Bye, then,’ she said.
Karel had picked up the empty glasses of tea, whose slices of lemon lay brown and bloated at the bottom. He put them on the shelf beside the Baby Belling, and said, turning, ‘You make my room nicely and then you go.’
Harriet looked at him. He was wearing a navy blue sweater over his white T-shirt, which showed at a slender neck. Above it his thin, suntanned face and curly dark hair were more beautiful than ever. He leaned against the wall and smiled at her, and she smiled back, realising suddenly: I shall never forget this moment. A shabby room, a hot summer street outside, Karel looking at me, holding out his hand.
Well. So this is love. So simple, so complete.
They lay upon the Indian bedspread and gazed into each other’s eyes. Karel’s were hazel, with interesting little flecks; Harriet’s were grey, terribly ordinary, she knew, but in looking into his she did not feel ordinary.
‘Harriet,’ he said slowly, stroking her hair.
‘Yes,’ she said, and felt herself on the threshold of a journey, which began with the expression in his eyes, and ended – where would it end?
‘My beautiful Harriet.’ He gathered her close.
‘There must be many beautiful girls in Czechoslovakia,’ she murmured wistfully.
‘That is true.’
She buried her face in his neck, thinking of them all.
‘But none of them called Harriet.’ Karel drew away, so that he could look at her again. ‘Never I think I will meet someone like you.’
‘Nor me.’ She closed her eyes on all this happiness.
Above them the doorbell rang with a vengeance: gigantic feet came thundering down the stairs. The door was opened to enthusiastic greetings and closed as if to keep out armies. Another little puff of plaster came floating down through the sunlight, on to their feet.
‘I must go,’ said Harriet.
He kissed her hand. ‘I wait for Friday.’
‘Me, too.’
He saw her to the door; she walked down the road to the tube in a dream.
Now, as they were approaching the restaurant hand in hand, she felt, still, as if such joy could not be quite real – even if it felt, also, as if it were the only real thing that had ever happened to her. Late afternoon sun and shadow barred the pavement; it seemed that only now did the pigeons murmuring on the ledges of Carnaby Street shop windows, and the screech of taxis in Regent Street have any meaning. She had lived in London all her life: Karel had brought it alive.
The tables by the restaurant windows were already occupied: people meeting early, after work, sat drinking herb tea from heavy stoneware cups, making their way through oat and apricot slices. She and Karel walked through the double glass doors as if they, too, were customers, and went through the restaurant to the back.
‘I’ll see you at supper,’ she said, reaching for the hessian apron on her peg. Another girl on the shift, already in her apron, came past them in the narrow corridor, and they greeted each other. Then Karel lifted Harriet’s hand to his lips in a gesture which felt as though it said everything – you are mine, I shall see you soon – and disappeared through the swing doors into the kitchen. Harriet brushed her hair, hung up her bag on the peg and went out to the counter, thinking: I have everything I ever wanted. Please may it last for ever.
And it wasn’t until the following morning, coming down late to breakfast in Thackeray Gardens, still in her nightdress and not quite awake, that she realised, seeing the faces of her parents and brother as they sat listening to the news, that nothing could last for ever, and that falling in love, which had seemed to encompass everything, was, in the scale of world events, only a little thing really. That evening, in the drawing room, she turned on the television; her family joined her and they all stood in silence: watching the tanks crawl through the beautiful streets of Prague, where people stood numbly: watching Czechoslovakia fall.
Chapter Two
They stood on the Continental platform at Victoria station and waited for the train to Dover. It was four o’clock on an afternoon in autumn. All through August London had baked, the grass in Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens parched and brown, the air dry, the pavements dusty. Now it was a little cooler, the platform and empty track lit by a sun which felt melancholy and pale, even though it was still only just September.
It felt melancholy, but it would have done so today whatever the season. Ten weeks ago Karel had arrived in England. It was eight weeks since Harriet had walked into the restaurant kitchen, put down a trayful of stoneware plates next to the new washer-up and realised, with each returning trayful, how much she liked the look of him. It was three weeks since the Russian tanks had crossed the Czechoslovakian border, and during that time the look of Karel had changed.
Harriet had seen pounds drop off his lean frame overnight. She had seen fury and despair in a face which until now had been filled with interest and humour and affection. She had watched him watching the television in her parents’drawing room, smoking in a house where no one smoked, swearing in English and Czech in a house where no one, on the whole, ever swore, as modest, slant-eyed Mr Dubcek disappeared.
There were frightening rumours. Harriet made Karel endless cups of coffee and paced up and down the kitchen while the kettle came to the boil. What was he going to do?
This was what he was going to do. They stood on the platform, not touch
ing or talking, waiting for the train. From Dover Karel would cross the Channel to Ostend; once there he would travel with his rucksack halfway across Europe: through Rotterdam, West Berlin, East Berlin, Dresden, crossing the heavily guarded German border and coming, at last, to Prague. A different city from the one he had left, full of hope: a city now under occupation, filled with resentment and fear.
‘What else can I do?’ he had asked her, packing his things in the Earls Court basement.
You could stay with me, thought Harriet bleakly, but she knew it was not possible. There was his family, his mother in tears on the telephone, on the single occasion he had managed to get through; there were all his friends, active in a crisis he could only watch on a foreign television. There was the expression in his eyes, his withdrawal from everything here: from the restaurant, from the bedsit, with its Indian bedspread and fading flowers; from her. Prague was his home, and home, at such a time, was everything.
‘Of course you must go,’ she told him, and folded the bedspread and put it in a carrier bag to take home. Then: ‘Karel? You have this. Please.’
He took the bag and looked inside and smiled. It seemed such a long time since she’d seen that smile.
‘Keep it,’ she said. ‘Go on.’
He nodded, raising her hand to his lips. ‘I keep and remember Harriet.’
They kissed, then, their first proper kiss for weeks, standing in the middle of the denuded room, oblivious to Australians overhead; oblivious, it felt for a while, to everything. But love, as Harriet rediscovered most sorrowfully then, cannot, in such circumstances, be allowed to cast a country to oblivion, and anyway had not been spoken of. Not really. They drew apart, and finished packing.
